Cleland was born in
Sydney,
Australia, the son of Professor Sir
John Burton Cleland (1878–1971) and his wife, Dora Isabel Paton (1880–1955). Cleland studied medicine in
Adelaide and graduated in 1934. He moved to the
UK in 1938 with the intention of becoming a physician, but his experiences during the
Second World War sparked an interest in surgery. He was further influenced by
Tudor Edwards, Lord
Russell Claude Brock and Sir
Clement Price Thomas. In 1948 he was appointed consultant thoracic surgeon at
Royal Brompton Hospital and
Kings College and the following year as a lecturer at
Hammersmith Hospital, where
Dennis Melrose was developing the
heart-lung machine. In 1953 Cleland performed the first open-heart operation in the UK and in 1959 was the first surgeon to operate on the condition
obstructive cardiomyopathy. In 1959 the Hammersmith team, with Dennis Melrose's
heart-lung machine, Cleland as the lead surgeon and
Hugh Bentall as the assistant surgeon, were invited by
Alexander Bakulev to the
Institute of Cardiovascular Surgery in
Moscow where, watched by over 200 surgeons from the
Soviet Union, they carried out five open-heart operations leading to the introduction of
open-heart surgery to
Soviet Russia.
Anastas Mikoyan, the
First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union at the time, congratulated the team saying "Doctors are clean, but politicians are dirty". Cleland was civilian consultant to the
Royal Navy, a post he held until his retirement in 1977. Cleland established heart surgery units in
Egypt,
Iraq and
Syria and was awarded the
Order of the Falcon and the
Order of the Lion of Finland by the Icelandic and Finnish governments respectively. ==References==